iPhone dev: basic image processing package

One of our Ars editors pointed me to a Google code repository that offers a simple set of base image processing tools. These tools, which were written in C++, work with the standard iPhone UIImage class to apply operations like edge detection and histogram equalization with a minimum of work. The code is released under a BSD license and attributed to author CM Greening.

The code ships with a bare bones Xcode testbed, making it easy to try out its features. In its default form, this testbed converts images to grayscale, applies a gaussian blur, and then performs Canny edge extraction. The resulting UIImage and the source are displayed together in a pushed view controller. You can see a sample screen shot here in this post.

All image calls are defined in the Image.mm file found in the sample code. The file contains what appears to be stock routines that are called by class wrapper methods. I wish the project had a little better documentation and more samples, especially in the Image.h header file. However, the brief tests I performed seemed to confirm that everything works as promised.

When you need to apply basic image operators, the Simple Image Processing project looks like a quick and easy solution. It offers a total of eight operators, which will be either exactly what you're looking for or not. If they are, they'll likely save you a lot of time reinventing the image processing wheel as they appear to offer drop-in-and-use functionality.

Simple iPhone Image Processing by CMGreening is hosted at Google Code. It is distributed under the New BSD License as C++ classes with an Objective-C testbed.